Venus Envy Read online

  Praise for Venus Envy

  “Probably the best work Ms. Brown has done since her best seller Rubyfruit Jungle … Venus Envy sets you to laughing, then skewers with honesty.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Rita Mae Brown is back, and so is her take-no-prisoners sense of humor.”

  —The Charlotte Observer

  “Brown’s portraits of the country club set in Charlottesville, Va., ring so true that it will chill your bones. Her insights into what makes people tick and why the ticking finally leads to explosions are also deadly accurate.”

  —The Commercial Appeal, Memphis

  “Irreverent fun … Brown reminds us of how much it can cost to tell the truth.”

  —The Sacramento Bee

  BOOKS BY RITA MAE BROWN

  WITH SNEAKY PIE BROWN

  Wish You Were Here

  Rest in Pieces

  Murder at Monticello

  Pay Dirt

  Murder, She Meowed

  Murder on the Prowl

  Cat on the Scent

  Sneaky Pie’s Cookbook for Mystery Lovers

  Pawing Through the Past

  Claws and Effect

  Catch as Cat Can

  BOOKS BY RITA MAE BROWN

  The Hand That Cradles the Rock

  Songs to a Handsome Woman

  The Plain Brown Rapper

  Rubyfruit Jungle

  In Her Day

  Six of One

  Southern Discomfort

  Sudden Death

  High Hearts

  Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual

  Bingo

  Venus Envy

  Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War

  Riding Shotgun

  Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser

  Loose Lips

  Outfoxed

  DEDICATED TO

  JUDY ELAINE HILL AND MARGARET MACINNIS

  TWO VERY DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS WHO WHEN TROUBLES CAME

  BEHAVED WITH RESTRAINT AND COMPASSION.

  THE TERM FOR SUCH BEHAVIOR

  USED TO BE “LADY.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Medical terminology and procedures were foreign to me so I owe a debt to Dr. Herbert C. Jones for providing me with those facts. As Dr. Jones is one of my most cherished friends he also provided me with laughter.

  I wish to thank the American Film Institute in Los Angeles for selecting me for the Directing Workshop for Women, Eighth Cycle, which although focused on film enriched my sense of the novel in unexpected and delightful ways. Much of the delight was learning from the other participants.

  Wendy Weil, my literary agent and my friend, was always there when needed.

  Beverly Lewis, my editor, as usual made clear and intelligent suggestions and I am grateful.

  Robert Lyn Kee Chow, my coach, worked with me for six weeks this summer and drove my body so hard that my mind had time to replenish.

  Dr. Frank Kimball buoyed me with his wit, his keen observations on humans and horses and his courage.

  I’ve finally realized that I probably can’t live without Gordon Reistrup who is ferociously bright, well-organized, and wonderfully funny. We’ve worked together for four years and I hope he’s enjoyed them as much as I have.

  As Sneaky Pie now writes her own mysteries she helped not a bit on this novel, but the other cats and dogs showed up for work each morning. The offerings of dead mice, moles, shrews, and snakes were greatly appreciated.

  1

  DYING’S NOT SO BAD. AT LEAST I WON’T HAVE TO ANSWER the telephone.” Frazier Armstrong breathed deeply, which wasn’t easy, since the oxygen tube stuck down her throat had rubbed it raw. “Then again, I will never have to fill out the IRS long form, buy a county sticker for my car, be burdened with insurance payments that stretch into eternity, to say nothing of my business license and the damned money I pay to the county each year on my depreciating business machines. No more mortgage payments and no more vile temptation as the doors of Tiffany’s yawn at me like the very gates of Hell.” She burrowed ever deeper into the hospital bed. Porthault sheets brought from home made the bed more comfortable but every time she glanced at the saccharine wallpaper, a dusty rose with tiny little bouquets, she thought, “One of us has to go.”

  Nestling should have made her feel better but it didn’t. What certainly made her feel better was the morphine solution dripping into her left arm. She laughed to herself: “I pay a business tax, an amusement tax, a head tax, a school tax, a poll tax, a gas tax, a light tax, a cigarette tax. I even pay tax on Tampax. I hate paying and paying and paying. All I do anymore is work and obsess about money, which is how I landed in here. Still”—she wistfully noticed the slanting rays of the afternoon sun through the Venetian blinds—“I wouldn’t mind living.”

  Thirty-five was too young to die, especially for someone with as much energy as Frazier. At first the shortness of breath and tightness in her chest had irritated her but hadn’t bothered her. Stress. Well, stress and two packs of Muleskinners a day. Her assistant, Mandy Eisenhart, hounded her to go to the doctor but Frazier had better things to do with her time than plop her butt in Yancey Weems’s office. He was a nice enough doctor but too fond of needles.

  Over the last year her breathing had deteriorated until she could hear an odd metallic rattle in her bronchial tubes. Billy Cicero, her best friend and rent-a-date, told her she had hairballs. He stopped laughing when she was rushed to the E.R. two nights ago. The pain in her chest hurt so much that each time she breathed, tears came to her eyes.

  The admitting physician ordered a battery of tests. She heard the head nurse mumble something in the afternoon about “blood gases were obtained.”

  Being canny as well as highly intelligent, Frazier paid a young nurse to interpret the lab work currently reflected on her chart. She had bilateral inoperable carcinoma of the lungs which had spread to the chest walls and invaded her spine.

  The only remaining test—which seemed a waste of her evaporating time—was a lung X-ray, but the X-ray equipment was under repair, causing a backup mess not only for the hospital patients but for those physicians sending patients to the hospital for the procedure.

  Poor Billy, that corrupt choirboy, wept when Frazier told him what she had so recently learned about her condition. She’d known the handsome Billy since their cradle years. It was the only flash of genuine emotion she’d ever seen in him and his response provoked a fierce spasm of love on her part. If only things had been different for them. They weren’t exactly star-crossed lovers. Hard to be star-crossed with a man who enjoys snorting cocaine off erect black penises but still, what if things had been different?

  No more “what ifs.” No more anything. Death, the long dirt sleep, promised peace.

  Frazier sat bolt upright in the bed. She emphatically hated the idea of being locked in a casket. Cremation. That seemed more civilized and sanitary. Who wants to be a worm’s hamburger? Just yesterday she and her mother, Libby Armstrong, had battled until the tears flowed and the nurses had charged in like a remnant of some old Austrian regiment clothed in sparkling white. Libby just screamed and hollered about a Christian burial and Frazier screamed and hollered right back. “I don’t want to get stuck in the ground like hazardous waste!”

  Libby’s luminous green eyes glowed. “Well, it’s certainly preferable to being fried—fried, I tell you, Mary Frazier Armstrong. Just crisp like chitlins. You’ll be reduced to ash like the tip of your Muleskinner cigarettes and how many times did I tell you not to smoke? No willpower, Mary Frazier, no willpower and here you are wasting away with lung cancer and I don’t know what to do. And your poor brother is just prostate with grief.”

  “Prostrate, Mother.”

/>   “That’s what I said. He’s on the floor.”

  “Carter’s on the floor because he’s dead drunk.”

  “Don’t you talk that way about your brother. He has an affliction. The Irish blood, you know, from your father’s mother. Every one of them a victim to strong waters. Now our family—”

  “Mother, I don’t care anymore. I don’t care where Carter’s alcoholism came from, he has to stop drinking.”

  “You didn’t stop smoking.”

  “And I’m about to expire, which I must say will be a relief because I won’t have to hear any of this shit anymore!”

  “How dare you speak to me that way? I am still your mother.”

  “Not for long!” Frazier shouted with jubilation. “You know what I think the family is, Momma? The family is the transmission belt of pathology. That’s what I think. You always take Carter’s part and Daddy always takes mine and who gives a flying fuck? I don’t. I’m dying. I’m checking out of Hotel Earth. Sayonara. Adios. Ciao. Toodle-oo, auf Wiedersehen, and bye. Roger, wilco, over and out, Mom.”

  Libby shrieked, “You are hateful. You’ve got a mean streak in you, girl.”

  As the grammar disintegrated, Frazier began to cough violently, her spittle flecked with blood. The nurse rushed in as her mother rushed out, tossing her worn Common Service Book of the Lutheran Church onto Frazier’s bed. Libby had tried to control Frazier’s life. Now she wanted to control her death.

  Libby hadn’t returned and as Frazier recalled their “little outburst,” which was how Libby would describe the scene to her husband, an outburst she would chalk up to the morphine for “pain management,” this formerly, dutiful daughter hoped she wouldn’t see her mother again in this life. And if there was reincarnation she didn’t want to see her in any future lives either.

  A light knock at the door alerted her that she would endure more human contact before Death snatched her in his cold claws.

  “Sistergirl.”

  “Hey, boy.” Frazier smiled as the door swung open and Carter Redington Armstrong entered the room. He was Frazier’s mirror image. Blond and good-looking, with a crooked smile that defused any criticism, Carter was what Southern women called a handsome devil. Broad shoulders and a narrow waist proved that, despite his battles with the bottle, he worked out, he tried. According to Big Daddy, Frank Armstrong, he just didn’t try hard enough.

  “Momma’s ass over tit.” He scraped a chair next to the bed. “I am her emissary but I’d have come anyway. She wants to make up with you before … Well, you know.”

  “I know.” Frazier sighed. “What’s the deal? Momma’s always got some deal to cut.”

  “Her Mothership did not entrust me with such details.”

  “Liar.” Frazier smiled, then coughed. “Goddammit, I hate this tube. I just plain hate it. Shit. Fuck. Damn!” Frazier yanked the tube out of her throat and breathed a deep gurgly breath. Blood was smeared over the end of the tube.

  “Frazier—”

  “Let it be, dammit. If I’ve got to die, then I am dying without that thing tearing up my throat.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Carter shifted his weight. He noticed the flowers, hard not to notice. Thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers filled Frazier’s room, as would be expected given her social status, to say nothing of her business position. His green eyes, like their momma’s and Frazier’s, fell on an enormous horseshoe. “Billy.”

  “Billy.”

  “I hate that sumbitch.”

  “You used to like him.”

  “Not after tenth grade, that cocksucker.”

  “Carter, that was a long time ago. He’s found other wonderwands to suck. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Billy. You go home and tell Momma that I am going to be cremated. It’s in my will and there’s not a thing she can do about it.”

  He sighed deeply. “Okay.”

  “She’ll bitch and moan, I know, but she won’t be bitching and moaning at you.”

  “The old man been in today?”

  “Crack of dawn.”

  “Dad’s not doing so good.” For Carter to perceive his father’s emotions was a great leap forward, as they used to say in China.

  “Yeah.” Frazier nodded. She reached over and sipped from a glass of water but it burned violently. She quickly put the glass back on the nightstand.

  “Bad?”

  “I don’t care much anymore.”

  Carter’s eyes filled. “Oh, Sis, what am I gonna do without you? I know I’ve always been a worthless sack of shit but I love you. I always loved you.” He dropped his head on the bed and Frazier ran her fingers through his thick curly hair.

  “I know, Brudda, I know.” She called him by his childhood name. She couldn’t say brother when she was tiny; she called him Brudda. “It was kind of a setup that we’d be pitted against each other, you know.”

  “I know, I know.” He sobbed. “I could do no right and you could do no wrong.”

  “In Daddy’s eyes. ’Course, if it was Momma it was the reverse.”

  He lifted his eyes to hers. “But, Frazier, did you have to be so successful?”

  “You know, I’ve had ample melancholy opportunity to think about us. Yes, I did have to be so successful. I just didn’t want to be … like her. And I guess you didn’t want to be like him. Since Big Daddy made himself a ton of money, oh, Carter, I don’t know. Maybe you just rebelled and said, ‘I ain’t doing jack shit.’ Well, you hurt him. You surely did hurt him, but you hurt you too. You’re as smart as I am.”

  Carter grabbed a tissue and wiped his eyes, blew his nose. “I don’t know about that. I couldn’t have started an art gallery. I couldn’t abide your customers.”

  “Maybe not an art gallery, but you could have done something else.”

  “What?”

  “Carter, how many times have we talked about this? You could have gone into the paving business with Dad.”

  He threw up his hands. “And have him tell me day in and day out that I’m half the man he is? No fuckin’ way. Nothing I do is or ever was good enough for him!”

  “Maybe failure gets to be a habit. Maybe it’s comfortable. God knows you’ve got enough women making excuses for you. Momma, your wife, your mistresses.” He didn’t flinch at the word mistresses, so she continued: “Maybe being adored by women is kind of a curse—know what I mean?”

  He nodded. He did know what she meant but he still stalled on the runway. Thirty-seven years is a long time to wait for liftoff. “You think I’m a bum?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly I think you’re self-indulgent and I think you’ve wasted a lot of time hating me ’cause I grabbed the brass ring, if you’ll forgive an awful expression.”

  “Dying flushes out the truth, doesn’t it?” A rueful smile crossed his chiseled lips. “While we’re on the subject of flushing, I don’t want Billy Cicero at your funeral. I don’t care if he is heir to the largest tobacco fortune in the United States. He’s a sleazeball. I mean, Sistergirl, what we don’t know about that bastard we can’t even imagine.”

  However, Frazier did know. She didn’t need to imagine. “He’s got his ways. I don’t want to waste what time I have left arguing with you about Billy. I want us to make up. I don’t want you to have guilt about me, or harbor resentment. I’m going to be out of this mess. You, Brudda, got another good forty to fifty years of it. Until we resolve conflicts we repeat them.”

  “Shut up,” Carter flared. “Don’t rub that therapy bull on me. It’s just another form of religion, I tell you, and it’s as full of baloney as the old one.”

  “Then let me put it in plain English. Stop comparing yourself to Dad. Stop comparing yourself to me. Stop drinking. Stop pretending you like selling real estate. If you won’t go into Armstrong Paving, then buy a goddam shrimp boat on the Gulf of Mexico and be a captain. It’s the only thing you love and you’re a damned fine sailor. Screw the country club. Screw the state of Virginia. Screw everyone’s expectations of Frank Armstrong’s boy. Go be
your own man.”

  “You don’t like Virginia?”

  “I love Virginia. That’s not the point.”

  He rubbed his chin. A blond stubble accentuated his natural virility. “Well … well, if only we could have talked like this years ago. I …” Tears spilled onto his muscled chest. “Forgive me, Sistergirl, forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “For hating you. I should have been proud when you made your first million but I wanted you dead. And now …” He broke down again.

  “There’s nothing to forgive, Brudda, nothing at all. I didn’t do anything to make life easier for you. I didn’t want you around my customers. I treated you like a dumb redneck and you’re not and I sucked up to Dad. Oh, how I sucked up to Dad to get the seed money to start the gallery. I paid him back every penny plus interest but I know that when you wanted to buy that quarry to start your own business he wouldn’t give you a dime. I didn’t talk to him. I didn’t do a damned thing except agree with him when he said you’d get drunk and go bankrupt.”

  “He’s probably right.” Carter sobbed even harder.

  “It doesn’t have to be like that. Believe in yourself. You’re the only brother I’ve got and I didn’t. I mean …” She was crying too.

  The nurse came in to find brother and sister wrapped in each other’s arms, crying so hard they were gasping. She gently extricated Carter, then tried to put the tube down Frazier’s throat. Carter charmed the well-meaning lady into leaving his sister alone. After she retreated they spoke quietly for a bit and then Carter left. Frazier watched his back as he walked away, wondering if she’d ever see him again, and worrying that he wouldn’t change. He could be a happy man, if only …

  But then, was she happy? She’d made a mess of money and she’d make even more if she could live. She knew her field, she loved it, and she loved profit. Ah, yes, profit, the sweetest word in the English language. No, net profit was the sweetest, truly the sweetest. Net profit. But had she been happy? She lied to her family. She lied to her friends. She lied double-time to her lover. The only person she told the truth to was Billy Cicero and he was an even bigger liar than she was. Well, no. She told the truth to Mandy. Beautiful, black Mandy, whom she teased and called “Afrodite.” She had left the business to Mandy in her will. Mandy wouldn’t know that until the will was read. The Stubbs, John Sartorius, the Marshalls, the Herricks, all the fabulous English sporting art, to say nothing of the other merchandise—uh, art, the Thiebaud. The list was glorious and expensive, deliciously expensive. Were she going to live, Frazier would make Mandy her partner on Mandy’s birthday. Frazier wished they could have the chance to work together that way. Mandy deserved to be her partner but it gave Frazier some solace to know that Mandy Eisenhart was going to be one of the richest young single black women in Virginia. Maybe there was some justice in this world or the next. Mandy was the only person she would really miss. Funny. They never socialized. The relationship was all business but when she thought about her life, that was her greatest love, that damned art gallery, those incredible paintings.